Riot is yet again proving they are completely incapable of doing anything that is not League of Legends, TFT or Valorant.
I just started playing the game after it launched on consoles because they need their bullshit anticheat for a fucking fighting game for some reason, so I can't run it on Linux, and not even a month after the official release they are already firing half the development team.
This is smelling awfully like another LOR, which didn't die because the game is "too fair" or whatever other bullshit g*mers say about the game, but rather because Riot is literally incapable of doing the bare minimum to ensure their own game's success, be it doing actual advertising, both irl and in other related games they own like the fucking League client, or doing joint events between their games, or not asking for an arm a leg for a single skin like it is right now on 2XKO.
How can this multi billion dollar company be so incompetent?
Devs talking about being fired:
I actually meant MvC3 and my brain just farted.
Why? You share the steering wheel in every moba, you share the steering wheel in every hero shooter.
It would just be a team game where you play 1 character on the team. It would have its own individual identity as a fighting game that isn't like any other fighting game. The tag fighter they made is derivative as a solos game, it brings nothing to the table anyone hasn't done already. But as a duos game it shines. That's the identity it should have centred and made its entire thing.
Riot as a company would be all about team games in every genre, League, Valorant, 2XKO. They had this chance to make a fighter that is ONLY a team game and they chickened out.
Instead what they've made is a fighting game that will forever be niche, serving only the existing fighting game community and not attracting anyone outside of it because at the end of the day it's just like every other tag fighting game. If those games didn't attract and retain a new audience, 2XKO would not either.
If this were true Smash wouldn't be wildly more popular than every single other fighting game. That's not because Smash is easier to succeed in at high level play, it's because it actually caters to an audience that aren't hardcore, while retaining the ability for high level play to exist.
Smash is more popular because the core mode, the heart of the game, is not competitive singles. The core mode of Smash is large scale party play with absolute chaos occurring to bring down the level of optimisation through randomness and complete bullshit so that the average person has a good time with it without learning practically anything at all, even if matched in lobbies with people that will stomp them despite the bullshit. This would be the same if singles were not the core mode, but instead duos were, the chaos and randomness of mistakes and nonsense would bring down the level of play and bring in an element of casualness that retains an audience of significantly lower skill players.
These games don't retain players outside of hardcore people because their primary modes are hardcore. Sakurai is apparently the only person that seems to understand this at all.
Ah, okay, that's fair. I do think it also has meaningful differences from MvC3, but it's a much closer comparison
I explain why, because in those games you are actually independent characters, which is not true in a tag fighter. Short of dying, you basically never need to actually sit out of the game in those games, much less get yanked into or out of being able to play by a teammate (idr which one this game does).
I expect League players have been playing it as well, insofar as anyone has been.
Smash, mostly Melee and its derivative mods, are my favorite fighting games and specifically what I had in mind while I was saying it.
But the thing is, modern Smash is an excellent example of a game that takes great pains to be extremely accessible in ways that your proposal fails to be. You do not need to practice and practice to engage with fundamental system mechanics in a pretty consistent manner, you simply do not. That is not true of a game with mandatory 2v2 because in that game, as I think you understand, team combos become a fundamental system mechanic. Another merit of MOBAs and hero shooters, incidentally, is that they let you have a pretty wide range of choices with what mechanics you want to engage with and how, which is part of why beginning semi-competitive players tend to like playing healers and such, because it's much more low-pressure and lets you mostly avoid a subset of what are otherwise critical skills (e.g. aim is typically way less important) while working on other fundamentals (like movement, communication, evasion, cooldown management if that applies, etc.)
Incidentally, other reasons for Smash being successful besides the Intellectual Property elephant in the room is the emphasis on customization (e.g. not forcing you to have more than two players) and on single player content (something that you cannot have in this format unless you propose having an AI play the other character). Making people need to play on a team is opposed to what makes Smash successful, and that's in a situation where being on a team with a stranger is more accessible and pleasant because it isn't a tag fighter.